This paper reviews evidence on the performance of urban public transport governance regimes in place in the Netherlands over the past 15 years. The national government decided to move from a system of ad hoc subsidy payments to one with more decentralised government control and tendering, though...

The European railway industry continues to undergo reform and liberalization due to European law incentives. Recent events in Italy give the country a special place in this process: a new competitor has commenced operations in the high-speed rail (HSR) market based on a private initiative. This...

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of the poorest countries in the World. The construction sector will play an essential part to bring the country on the path of economic growth, and competition within the sector is crucial to achieve this goal. In this paper we analyze the effect of...

The aim of the paper is to give suggestions about how an agri-environment index can be designed by taking into account specific ecological and economical factors that reflect benefits and costs of biodiversity conservation. Main findings are that the general structure of an agri-environment...

We investigate the relationship between the time politicians stay in office and the functioning of public procurement. To this purpose, we collect a data set on the Italian municipal governments and all the procurement auctions they administered between 2000 and 2005. Identification is achieved...

Competitive tendering of local bus services in Germany has received increased attention. Employing Seemingly Unrelated Regression analyses, we observe that prices have regionally varying determinants; for example, while prices throughout most of the federal state of Hesse increase over time,...

Managed grasslands contribute in a number of ways to the biodiversity of European agricultural landscapes and provide a wide range of ecosystem services that are also of socio-economic value. Against the background of a rapid biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes, increasing attention is...

The article discusses the implementation of a new scheme for the outcome-based remuneration of environmental goods and services of agriculture that has been carried out as a case study in the period 2004 to 2006 in a German model region (county Northeim in the south of Lower-Saxony). This new...

Against the background of a rapid biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes, increasing attention is being paid to farming practices that enhance ecosystem services. Therefore developing a cost-efficient and effective conservation-compatible land use policy to influence private land...

Can enrolment incentives reduce the incidence of cream-skimming in the delivery of public sector services (e.g. education, health, job training)? In the context of a large government job training program, we investigate whether the use of enrolment incentives that set different 'shadow prices'...